The Forest Is The Path
Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024
Snow Patrol

Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody says the band’s new record was a process of two extremes. The first was the group’s initial attempt at making an eighth album, an undertaking that hit a dead end and left the indie-rock trio from Northern Ireland wondering where to go next. “It was genuinely nobody’s fault,” Lightbody tells Apple Music. “It was a constellation of things but it was a chaotic mess and we were very stressed. We were also on a deadline—technically, the record should’ve come out a year earlier. We now know never to work to a deadline again, because that’s no way to make art.”

Lightbody and bandmates Nathan Connolly and Johnny McDaid regrouped and gave it another go. In Stormzy and Adele producer Fraser T. Smith, they found a collaborator who made the creation of The Forest Is the Path feel like a comparative walk in the park. “The second time we made it was so calm and it all filtered down from the way Fraser not just works in the studio, but lives his life—calm and chill, sweet and funny,” Lightbody says. “There was so much laughter and silliness. It took five months the first time and five weeks the second time.”

You can almost hear the relief lighting up The Forest Is the Path, a record of space and breadth, where the band’s long-established melodic knack has room to recline over expansive, atmospheric instrumentation. All the Snow Patrol hallmarks are present and correct—stirring pop-rock sing-alongs,